When the 2024 Pop-Tarts Bowl culminated, a mascot dressed as the tasty breakfast treat descended into an 11-foot-tall toaster, complete with fireworks and the winning college football team cheering loudly.
What emerged was a life-sized edible Pop-Tart, serving as a championship treat devoured by the victorious Iowa State Cyclones.
But the team isn’t the only one that has gobbled up Pop-Tarts. Thanks to the sponsorship, the game has become a viral sensation. The mascots, the tie-ins, the fun. It has consumed college football – and will likely again for this year’s contest on December 27.
“Millions” more Pop-Tarts were sold in the month following the December 2024 game compared to the month before it, Pop-Tarts’ vice president of marketing Leslie Serro told Sports Business Journal.
The appetite for the Pop-Tarts Bowl has been “crazy good” since the first bowl game in 2023. Experts say that could partly be chalked up to the theatrics of Pop-Tarts Bowls: its googly-eyed mascots, the massive toaster, and the fully functional toaster baked into the trophy.
“What Pop-Tarts did was obviously kind of brilliant,” Bob Dorfman, a sports marketing veteran, told The Independent. The brand took traditions of a bowl game — the mascots, the trophy, the post-game award ceremony — and “really turned it upside-down and made them a lot more fun, a lot more interesting,” Bob Dorfman, a sports marketing veteran, told The Independent.
The brand “took the fun side of football and elevated it to something almost crazy, and they did — and they did it without ruining the heart of football,” Dorfman added.
Following the first Pop-Tarts Bowl in 2023, when the brand debuted its so-called “edible mascot,” the marketing campaign for the won several advertising awards. The human-sized Strawberry mascot — with a cartoonish face plastered onto colorful frosting — “sacrificed” itself in the enormous toaster, which popped out a four-foot-long Pop-Tart for the winners to eat.
Even after the sacrifice of the breakfast treat, social media revived the deliciously lovable character through viral memes. The brand even played into its own bit at the 2024 bowl game by resurrecting the Strawberry Pop-Tart in humanoid form. It appeared half-eaten, its white frosting replaced with exposed strawberry innards, sprinkles askew, and just one eye hanging on for dear life.
In the second-ever Pop-Tarts Bowl, three new flavors were introduced, including the famously sacrificed Frosted Cinnamon Roll. New flavors led to memes popping off online – including the moments the mascots dramatically ripped off their wrappers. This year, the gimmick continues: there will be six. The six flavors are divided among two teams, and for the first time, fans will get to vote on which team — Team Sprinkles or Team Swirls — will be eaten by this year’s bowl game champions.
This fan contest could “add more social media bump,” Dorfman predicted.
The social media channels have become hugely popular. On game day last year, Pop-Tarts saw “the highest brand search in more than 15 years,” Serro said.
Now, the official Pop-Tarts Bowl social media accounts have amassed tens of thousands of followers, while the brand’s official pages are even more popular, boasting 299,000 followers on TikTok and 374,000 on Instagram.
The brand is 61 years old, but through social media and the mascots’ appearances on commercials, “they’re keeping themselves relevant, not only around the actual game date, but year-round,” Eric Smallwood, the president of Apex Marketing Group, said.
He thought it was “the uniqueness of the activation” that made the brand’s marketing such a success, pointing to the effectiveness of the massive toaster by “showing how to use your product, right on the field” and then having the winning team eat it.
“It’s schticky in some regards, but it’s marketing,” Smallwood said.
Not shying away from the schtick at all, last year, organizers introduced a trophy equipped with a fully-functional toaster. The Pop-Tart-pushing prize will also make an appearance this year. Earlier this month, the coaches for Brigham Young University and Georgia Tech, the teams competing at this year’s bowl game, each slid a Pop-Tart into one of the trophy toaster’s two slots and then munched on the warm pastries.
“Our fans have made it clear: The Pop-Tarts Bowl isn’t just another game, it’s an experience,” Pop-Tarts Bowl CEO Steve Hogan said in a press release last December.
The clean name of the bowl game may also have contributed to its marketing triumph. The Cheez-It Citrus Bowl — Cheez-It, like Pop-Tarts, is owned by Kellanova — has a “mixed message” whereas the Pop-Tarts Bowl has a straightforward name, Smallwood said.
“Some will call it Cheez-It Citrus Bowl and some will call it Citrus bowl. So it will have a mixed message where the Pop-Tarts Bowl is the Pop-Tarts bowl. There’s no other words thrown in the mix. So that plays into the value piece too, because of the verbal mentions and how the media interprets it,” he said.
The combination of factors appears to be working. In 2023, Pop-Tarts generated roughly $12.1 million in brand value from media exposure, Apex Marketing Group found. That figure more than doubled last year to $26.1 million in the week surrounding the 2024 game.
Last year, 6.8 million viewers tuned in to watch the Pop-Tarts bowl, making it the most-watched edition of the bowl game held at the Orlando, Florida, stadium since 2008 under various names, according to ESPN. How many of those viewers were true football fans versus Pop-Tarts lovers isn’t clear.
The popularity of the bowl game, according to Dorfman, stems from “people thinking outside the Pop-Tarts box and coming up with cool ideas that don’t detract from the game, but make it more interesting and viewable and viral.”
The Cougars and the Yellow Jackets are set to off on December 27 at 3:30 ET— but so will Team Sprinkles and Team Swirls.
